When wars overwhelm welfare

When Civil Wars Recur: Conditions for Durable Peace after Civil Wars

We argue that the duration of the peace after civil wars is mainly a function of the extent to which the outcome of the previous civil war preserved a condition of multiple sovereignty and the extent to which the post-civil war environment creates incentives for dissident groups to resort to violence rather than sustain the peace. Hazard models suggest that the outcome of the previous conflict ...

When Are Welfare Guarantees Robust?

Computational and economic results suggest that social welfare maximization and combinatorial auction design are much easier when bidders’ valuations satisfy the “gross substitutes” condition. The goal of this paper is to evaluate rigorously the folklore belief that the main take-aways from these results remain valid in settings where the gross substitutes condition holds only approximately. We...

Empirical welfare analysis: when preferences matter

Fleurbaey and Maniquet have proposed the criteria of conditional equality and of egalitarian equivalence to assess the equity among individuals in an ordinal setting. Empirical applications are rare and only partially consistent with their framework. We propose a new empirical approach that relies on individual preferences, is consistent with the ordinal criteria and enables to compare them wit...

Poverty Orderings when Welfare Comparisons are Uncertain

In applied welfare economics, equivalence scales for household composition and size corrections, and appropriate price de‡ators are minimum requirements to perform interhousehold comparisons of welfare, measured via household income or consumption information. In practice, the information available is insu¢cient and only approximate price or household composition corrections are available. Pove...

When Child Welfare Works: A Working Paper